I live in a quiet residential area in Brooklyn. It’s nice, I feel the kids are safe outside.

Today my daughter went to the corner store with her older friend. No streets crossed, just walk to the corner, that’s it. Regular event in her summer.

Well, today she came running into the house out calling for me. Apparently there was this elderly drunk guy who was calling them over, and then trying to go after them. He fell over. He got up, and then got as far as the ramp to our block, and fell down the ramp.

Now, I would have called 311, or the local precinct, but every time I call about something like this, they say call 911. So although no one was dying or getting stabbed or robbed, I did. As I did this, a neighbor went up to chase the drunk away. He got him out of the private court/alley we live on, and back on the main street, where our drunk friend fell over, again. Took a while, and the guy was rude to him, refusing to leave, at first.

Eventually the cops showed up. We kept a distance (I had kids with me) and as I started to walk away, the cops started to get into the car. WITHOUT the guy. So I ran up, flagged them over, and told them that he went after the kids.

“Why didn’t you tell us that?” they asked me. Well, gee, I didn’t think that they would leave someone just laying on the sidewalk, on Emmons Avenue (a rather big street around here). I said something that was true, that when I worked in an emergency room, they used to bring people in messed up all the time. I suppose Bloomberg isn’t as concerned about quality of life issues as much as Guiliani was, or perhaps we are too busy getting ready for the RNC to pay much attention to the outer boroughs. I don’t know.

So they seemed rather put off by all this, but called an ambulance. Eventually the ambulance came, and everyone drove away. But really, what kind of city leaves an elderly intoxicated man who has caused enough trouble, doesn’t try to talk to any witnesses nearby but makes them flag them down?

Maybe if you find a guy in the gutter, and he isn’t bothering anyone, maybe leave him there. Not compassionate, but maybe no one will notice. Here, someone obviously phoned in that this guy was disturbing people (if you check the 911 call) so maybe you should DO something?

Getting email is sketchy. Usually I get it but a lot just disappears into a void. It doesn’t get bounced back, it doesn’t wind up in spam, it just disappears. I know this because they were done during tests between friends, or they were mailing list posts, that wound up in the archives of the list, but not my inbox.

They don’t always thread converastions properly, and they make it difficult to have orderly quoting when replying to people in a thread. You also cannot unthread a conversation at will. You must have Google order your stuff the way THEY want it ordered.

They put stuff from some Yahoo mailing lists in the spam box.

They haven’t given out any invites lately, either.

I’m not pleased with Gmail, for a free service it’s fine, the space is nice, but it’s not the answer to all your email problems, not by a longshot.

It started innocently enough. My parents watched my kids yesterday while I worked on Project Blog, and took them to a church fair.

They ate fair-like food, played fair-like games. Including the one where you throw the ball in the bowl and get the goldfish.

My middle son, F, won.

So unlike days past when you got a little glass bowl (with food coloring usually) and a 10 cent goldfish used to feed snakes, this time you got a fish in a bag. Not even a bowl! So the poor thing was already on it’s way to the great big fishbowl in the sky by time he got to my house, even though my mom sent the kids home with a nice big bowl for him.

Within hours, he was dead.

Well, this wouldn’t do. My kids, especially F, were upset. He took out his ‘remembery box’ to put the fish in for burial. He wanted to take it to a cemetery. (Some of you may remember he took my grandmother’s death rather hard, this just added to his confusion and all that.) We decided, at least, the yard was good enough.

But we had to get more fish.

But I knew we couldn’t do it half-assed. I don’t want to deal with a yard full of ‘remembery boxes’ and a kid (or kids) having to deal with small things dropping dead on a frequent basis. So off to Petland Discount we went.

$25 for the basic tank with hood. $5 for 3 fancy goldfish. Small, but cute. One with the bugged out eyes, two beautiful shimmery orangy gold ones.

I think one is Sponge Bob and one is Gary, my daughter K refuses to name hers (the black one) something Sponge Bob related. Oh well.

So I spent the day setting up this tank, burying fish, trying not to get too grumpy over the lack of sleep, all over a fish that was won at a church fair yesterday.